August 1970 issue of Space City!, cover image courtesy Houston Metropolitan Research Center
“The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is watching you.”
An arrow bearing that note was shot into the Space City! office. The incident was one among many threats and acts of violence against progressive and radical institutions in Houston. The KPFT station transmitter was bombed off the air twice. Bullets were shot at and yellow paint thrown on the walls of Margaret Webb Dreyer‘s gallery, which she ran out of her home from 1961 to 1975. The gallery had served as a counterculture hub according to Thorne Dreyer, her son and an editor of Space City!.
Thorne Dreyer shared these stories at an event on alternative media also featuring veteran writers Tom Curtis, Gabrielle Cosgriff, and Michael Berryhill. The Museum of Printing History hosted the panel discussion in conjunction with “Underground in H-Town,” an exhibition that highlights the importance of minority and alternative publications in local history.
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450-square-foot apartment in Westmoreland Place, Photos by Chris Nguyen
Yesterday, a Houston apartment won best “tiny” after four rounds of voting on the popular website Apartment Therapy. The 450-square-foot entry by Chris Nguyen also took the United States grand prize out of 165 featured places and 500 submissions. What did Nguyen say inspired his design? “The opposite of everything in Texas.”
The tech-savvy layout uses a $50 Ikea roller blind as both a room separator and two-sided projection screen.
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BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, all images by Susan Rogers
While Houston often parallels national trends, it also bucks them. Looking at one slice of the city, — the Bellaire/Holcombe Corridor from the Medical Center to Highway 6 — provides insight into the major shifts that have occurred in the landscape and demographics of our cities over the last 20 years.
First a little history. Immigration to the U.S. spiked in two periods: the first period roughly around 1900 and the second at the turn of the 21st century. Yet the two periods are strikingly dissimilar, in one era assimilation was rewarded and quite seamless as most new residents arrived from Europe, in the second era a transnational approach is more common, where global connections to home countries, cultural traditions, and languages are maintained.
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New wing of the Julia Ideson building, photos by Anna Mod
The new 21,500 square-foot archival wing of the Julia Ideson Library opened in mid-April to the celebration of researchers who had been without access since November when the Houston Metropolitan Research Center closed entirely in preparation for the move. This state-of-the-art addition now houses the HMRC’s collection of photographs, historic maps, architectural drawings, rare books, oral histories, and books relating to Houston and Texas. If it was in the Texas Room, it is now in this brightly lit, newly opened wing.
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